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Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism

• wetpaws 11mo ago
  [dead]
• leecommamichael 11mo ago
  Has it? Really? I'm pretty sure culture in the US has become significantly more overtly erotic over the past 30 years...
  • actionfromafar 11mo ago
    Depends on what you mean - in a very overt, marketed and non-french way, sure.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Yes, and no. in my eyes we compartmentalized sexuality to its own "dark" pocket of the internet. But in that corner it's more diverse, extreme, and widespread as ever. The latest waves of trying to ban porn certainly shows that this isn't what those in power desire, though.
• dontwannahearit 11mo ago
  I read the article. I found it hard going so probably was not for me but the impression it left me with was: "I let the internet fck with my mind, now I want to un-fck it." USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU.
  • stackghost 11mo ago
    >USE the internet, don't to let it use YOU. There are several multi-billion dollar enterprises who spend all day every day trying to make their products more addictive (in your words, using YOU). It's unlikely a meaningful number of people can pull themselves off of the dopamine treadmill by their bootstraps.
    • bavell 11mo ago
      It's not that they can't per se, they just don't care that much.
      • stackghost 11mo ago
        Yeah my grandfather used to say the same thing about cigarettes. He could quit any time he wanted; he just didn't want to.
    • amelius 11mo ago
      If enterprises can do that, then so can evil state actors. The only conclusion is that we have to shut down the internet.
      • stackghost 11mo ago
        We'll have to agree to disagree on "shutting down the Internet" being the only conclusion
        • amelius 11mo ago
          The majority won't agree.
• listenfaster 11mo ago
  What a solid piece of writing. I’m Gen X, and have talked with my siblings about the online realities my teenage nieces and nephews face, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion the author comes to in the last paragraph. Along the way, though, there was framing of a lot of points that I’ve struggled to find the right words for. So, bravo.
  • lojban 11mo ago
    You might also find the book Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice by Joseph J. Fischel interesting. I started reading it this week after seeing it mentioned elsewhere, and it touches many similar themes to this blog post so it's very fitting to see this posted today. The book discusses many things that I've had on my mind since #MeToo, but was never able to quite articulate. https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780520295414 https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780520295414
• EA-3167 11mo ago
  That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.
  • actionfromafar 11mo ago
    The front fell off the boat outside of society^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the environment.
  • MrScruff 11mo ago
    Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.
• pino999 11mo ago
  Weird stuff, you are just talking to a 5 year younger friend about hair brushing being pleasant and now you needr to apologize to the hair brusher? > She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them. This doesn't work that well in real life. Let me sketch a scenario: Oh eh, hi, eh, sorry, I have to admit than when you were brushing my hair, I was sexualizing you. You can't make it much better, perhaps write a formal letter and focus on the hairbrush: Three weeks ago, I was in your excellent shop. My hair never has been nicer. During the hair brushing, I got the feeling I felt a bit more for the hairbrush than I fell about you, I hope you can forgive me. That gives a nice feeling about what was first a fairly normal human interaction. It sounds hot though, good tip. But I got a humiliation kink, oh noes! How to resolve then? It is a catch-22 now. Need to do silly apologize, apologies are sexual, need to apologize for sexual feelings due to silly apologies. Haha, how do I get there?
  • TeMPOraL 11mo ago
    Makes me glad I have aphantasia, because "undressing someone with my eyes" is a metaphorical expression for me, and I don't have to worry about thinking something I might then need to apologize for. Now for the people who can visualize things in their mind, it's probably quite a lot more literal...
    • stavros 11mo ago
      I have solved this by not feeling like I need to apologise for my thoughts. I didn't know that anyone thinks otherwise, and I find it odd.
      • TeMPOraL 11mo ago
        I was writing in jest, as I assume the parent was too. Also having aphantasia sucks, I envy those who can visualize things in their mind.
• Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
  Nah. I'd like less "sexy" on the internet and most everywhere else. It's exhausting having people shove their sexuality in everyone's focus constantly. I'd like to be able to buy some muffins without being reminded about sex on the packaging, the description, and the product name. Let muffins be muffins. Just like extroverts are energy vampires for introverts, the non-sexually obsessed are tired of the sex obsessed wanting everything to be about celebrating the sexual obsessions of the sex obsessed. Broaden your horizons and get a hobby that doesn't involve telling everyone about what you want to do with your genitals.
  • hagbard_c 11mo ago
    This is downvoted, probably because it is considered to be 'conservative' and therefore 'bad' in this rather myopic community. It is also wholly to the point and correct in the observation that the ever-present sexualisation of - if not everything then at least a whole lot of things - is tiring and numbing. 'Sex sells' is taught at the marketing courses so sex is has to be. First a tiny bit, then a bit more because the last ad has already lost its edge. Then, a bit more still. Bit by bit, piece by piece the magic of sex is sold off for a lousy few euros or dollars or pesos or whatnot because sex sells. While people see more sexualised imagery then probably ever before younger people have less and less of sex with their peers. Sex sells, still. For how long, I wonder.
    • phantasmish 11mo ago
      If the take was intended as conservative, I’d say it’s actually leaning pretty far into “accidentally left-wing”. Market forces ruin fucking everything in their attempt to paperclip-maximize, if you don’t keep them on a leash. That includes sexiness. What’s described is an outcome of a system where “it makes number go up” is sufficient justification for almost anything.
    • Zigurd 11mo ago
      I'd wager in the reason it's downloaded if in fact it is, is that it's creepy, not "conservative." Views of sex that are retrograde and nostalgic, motivated by challenging depiction of sexuality, are the problem. As we've seen with some public figures, being closeted about gender preference, kink, etc. is the real problem, not whether young people are being choosier about sexual partners or are just less interested.
• titzer 11mo ago
  > “Who are you defending yourself against?” To which he answered, to my astonishment: “I don’t know. The world.” Indeed. Moving our every interaction in daily life plus our innermost thoughts to the internet has instilled a low-key fear in all of us that we'll be raked over the coals and villified as the world's worst villains. The digital tar and feathers are lurking always, a menacing psychological force. And it can even happen without our knowledge; some stranger can post a two second context-less clip or a snippet of a conversation and make us look our worst. It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time.
  • rapind 11mo ago
    > It's shocking how we can have so much outrage over unknown people but we're flush out of rage for the system that makes us so angry all the time. I suspect the answer is to find out who benefits from our misdirected anger, and whether they are also involved in creating and fostering this misdirected anger. It's old news now, but when I first heard about social media (Facebook specifically) and gaming companies hiring psychologists years ago, I knew it was pretty much over. Couple this with surveillance for the doom spiral.
    • jrm4 11mo ago
      This is pure paranoia; none of this requires a centralized bad guy.
      • wizzwizz4 11mo ago
        Whoever said anything about centralised?
        • bilbo0s 11mo ago
          This is what most don’t understand. The reality is, we’re all villains. And we’re all angels. And the only thing that determines how we’re perceived, is the disposition of those perceiving us. This person is a villain, because you don’t like this kind of person. That person is an angel, because you have an affinity with that person. There is no one benefiting, other than we ourselves. But don’t underestimate the power of the dopamine rush we all get by having our biases validated. We have already met the enemy.. He is us.
• renewiltord 11mo ago
  Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself). It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists. The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes. All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man. Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me! I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on. So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community. Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.
  • dinvlad 11mo ago
    This. I’m on X myself a lot (because everyone else in my circles is, not because I wanted) and it’s just such a bubble. Sometimes I want to just quit it all and touch grass
    • renewiltord 11mo ago
      Haha, I felt the same and never did anything about it. Then this Charlie Kirk fellow got shot and I’d coincidentally clicked on For You on Twitter (I know, first mistake, never do this) moments after and a vague tweet about “can’t believe this something something” had a bloody video of a man getting shot dead in the fucking neck. I remember wondering if I wanted to go through a week, maybe a month, of people tweeting about a guy getting shot and realized I really didn’t. Stopped. Thanks to that gore poster, I suppose. But I went back to look maybe a week ago and when I did it was incomprehensible. It was full of in-jokes and references that made no sense to me. Dunks and subtweets that were context free. Strangely a short period away made the whole thing look like an alien culture.
• mjr00 11mo ago
  The main thing I get out of this article is how easy it is to get trapped in a bubble thanks to algorithmic social media. For the most part, sexy never left, and statistics bear this out. OnlyFans brings in enormous amount of revenue, even after an expensive, failed attempt to be not-just-a-porn-site. Hypersexualized gacha games are pulling in tens of millions of dollars per month, and not just for men; the women-targeted Love and Deepspace had over $50 million in revenue in October. Marvel Rivals, criticized in some circles (such as the social circles of those in the article) for being an oversexualized "gooner game" has remained in the top 10 games played on Steam since its release a year ago. And nothing drives it home more than stumbling across the shady side of YouTube and finding videos in the "woman with large breasts not wearing a bra does something mundane" genre with multiple millions of views. > I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent. Ultimately, these are the kind of things discussed only by a small, vocal, very online (some might say terminally online) minority. To think that they represent more than a tiny fraction of the world is, again, reflective of how easy it is to get trapped into online echo chambers.
  • bbminner 11mo ago
    I would not say that this is due to a social media bubble - HN is the only social media i use, i have friends along the political spectrum, and still i can relate to many of the points that the author raised. At one point, I found myself increasingly uncertain and conflicted about my own "actual convictions", and "underlying motives", and whether someone else (even potentially!) labeling me as a creep or assuming poor intentions automatically makes me one. Some unfortunate preceding life experiences corroded my self image as well, which might have contribute to it, but that's not the point. I'd actually go further and argue that what appears to twist this social fabric inside out is not only the online nature of the interaction itself, but the corporate centralized algorithmic nature of it. I am in no way a proponents of decentralizing everything (social media, money, infra, etc) for the sake of it - most systems work more efficiently when centralized, that's just a fact of reality. Maybe the fact that ads, corporate communications (linkedin -speak posts / slack / mcdonald's twitter account) and social interactions now live in the same space (and barely distinguishable in feeds) must have somehow forced these spaces to use the most uniform neutered language that lacks subtleties allowed in 1:1 communications? So people speak in political slogans and ad jingles instead of actual thoughts? Because these spaces NEED people to speak like that to stay civil and "corporately acceptable"? I am just brainstorming, in no way suggesting that a "free for all" is a solution. I watched a movie called Anora recently, and toward the end there's a dialogue along the lines of - If not for these other people in the room, you'd have raped me! - No I wouldn't. - Why not? - (baffled and laughing) Because I am not a rapist. One way to interpret this movie, this dialogue, and what follows is that the main female character has been used and abused her entire life by the rich / capitalist system in general / embodied by a character of a rich bratty child of an oligarch in particular - that her world almost assumes this kind of transactional exploitation as a part of human relationships - and struggles to feel safe without it - almost seeking more exploitation to feel somewhat in control. And the other person in the dialogue above (who is not a rich child) counters that by asserting and knowing very well who he is (and isn't), and that knowledgeable doesn't require or provide any further justification. Tldr maybe the magical dream of a conflict-free society where people understand each other is not ours after all - maybe it is the ideal grassland for ad-driven social media to monetize our interactions in a safe controlled fashion? one evidence towards that is the de-personalized neutered templated nature of the kind of "advice" that people give online to earn social credit - that leaks into real world 1-to-1 interactions in the form of anxiety of being "watched and judged" - as described by the author?
• bignurgle 11mo ago
  author should touch grass
  • procaryote 11mo ago
    author should find new friends, who touch grass
• bArray 11mo ago
  > [..] seem to have internalized the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries of desire. I think the internet has some ownership of this, AI didn't help, and our transition from a high-trust society to low-trust society. It's more obvious if you switch the subject to any other - try telling a joke about racism in the wrong setting [1]. Private things should remain private, and consumed within a private context. In the UK for example, a person can be found guilty under the Malicious Communications Act and/or Online Safety Act. If your badly received joke involves a protected characteristic, that's now and aggravating factor and you just committed a crime against a protected minority. > I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism. The author was IRL cancelled by their friend: "In fact, it ended the friendship.". And the main complaint is that this has become part of the culture, specifically for sexuality. The author may not want to associate with the anti-movement for cancel culture, it is exactly what they are aligned with. > #MeToo was smeared by liberals and conservatives alike (united, as they always are, in misogyny) as being inherently punitive in nature, meant to punish men who’d fallen into a rough patch of bad behavior, or who, perhaps, might not have done anything at all (the falsely accused or the misinterpreted man became the real victim, in this view). You want the power without the responsibility of corruption. It's not like this stuff doesn't have real world consequences [2]. If, instead of adding names to a document, each of these women just stabbed to death the men they are accusing, let's say for really terrible accusations that we can agree that such a penalty should apply for. Sure, many people who are stabbed to death will have earned it, but we cannot be sure unless there is some right to address the accusation. The point is that without the ability to represent your counter-argument, there can be no real claim of justice. What is claimed as "social justice" is just the vigilante mob doing whatever it likes without accountability, and a lack of accountability is exactly what they are angry about in the first place. Two wrongs do not make a right. > But that link between sex and fear is operating in more “benign” or common modes of internet practice. There is an online culture that thinks nothing of submitting screenshots, notes, videos, and photos with calls for collective judgement. Wait wait wait. Hold on a damn second. We just literally spoke about a series of women submitting online notes for collective judgement. Now it's wrong? This reveals the fundamental problem, which is that the author is suppressed by the very behaviours that they have supported. [1] https://youtube.com/shorts/-3_-qYw33pU?si=bmPCOa8Ay8YQm4FK https://youtube.com/shorts/-3_-qYw33pU?si=bmPCOa8Ay8YQm4FK [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-repl...
• animanoir 11mo ago
  [dead]
• seydor 11mo ago
  the need to judge publicly is a subset of the need to publicize everything, a world where everyone is exhibitionist and selfies replace experiences. The people who do the former are primarily engaged in the latter. This will only get worse, we are one step away from people posting selfies of their foreplay before sex for public validation. It is already happening in tourism that people go to the beach for the selfies rather than swimming (seen that with my own eyes). Narcissism is slowly eating sexuality as well.
• npodbielski 11mo ago
  Wow, this is terrible. People really live like this? If I would say to my female friend that I like when hair dresser is stroking my hair, she would probably just look at me: 'ha ha! you nerd!'. Asking somebody to apologize for your own thoughts... The situation like that it is beyond cringe... if somebody would be doing that in my country, psychological help would be recommended.
  • switchbak 11mo ago
    This seems to be mostly (though not exclusively) a generational thing - as if things have changed to such a degree that you no longer have sovereignty over your internal experience. Like the boundary between public and personal has been removed. Certainly I've noticed this in North America. I've known people that just demand to know things about you, and simply can't understand that you have boundaries and that there's information which is simply none of their business. Like someone asking you how you voted, or if you find XYZ person attractive, etc. Usually with some intention to sniff out some kind of latent and hidden evidence of wrongthink. Talking with some of these people feels like you're just waiting for them to pounce on you once you step over a line - and of course to out you in a public fashion, even when it's just you and them! It's like people are bringing their Reddit personality into the real world, trying to score points by knocking others down. It's a really shitty way to be, and I've found even old friends fall into that trap. I think much of this is due to the shift from an individualistic focus to a more group-related identity. I'm old enough that I find that bizarre, in a creepy authoritarian kind of way.
    • tbrownaw 11mo ago
      > Like the boundary between public and personal has been removed. > Usually with some intention to sniff out some kind of latent and hidden evidence of wrongthink. "The personal is political." It's been a thing in recent decades.
    • npodbielski 11mo ago
      > I've known people that just demand to know things about you, and simply can't understand that you have boundaries and that there's information which is simply none of their business. Are they your friends or family? Like I can not imagine some social interaction that goes beyond those frames. Friends or family usually do know you pretty well, they do not need to ask. Other people? Usually firm: 'None of your business' is enough to mark end of conversation. Since usually, culture is imported to my side of the globe several years later, this makes me afraid for my kids. Will they have to fight peers like that? Will they become like that? This makes me wondering if I should not ban social media at my home till they grown up :D
• zozbot234 11mo ago
  The word "eroticism" in this article is quite misplaced. A fleeting sexual thought about a stranger who happens to be providing a service to you in that moment (hair brushing, apparently) has nothing to do with eroticism, precisely because it's not "sexualizing" in any real-world sense. Incidentally, eroticism properly understood (i.e. turning actual consensual love, intimacy and perhaps even sexuality itself into a genuine, positive and human-affirming artform) is also quite dead, but not for any reasons this article is talking about. It's just getting caught in a cross-fire between the most disrespectful and lewdest sort of commercial hardcore pr0n and a kind of renewed, reactive prudery from governments and policy-makers.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    >A fleeting sexual thought about a stranger who happens to be providing a service to you in that moment (hair brushing, apparently) has nothing to do with eroticism I argue that's eroticism in its purest form. >a quality that causes sexual feelings, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love. both subjects don't need to be purposefully sexualizing for an erotic event to happen. That's a bit of what powers some of the more out there fetishes (like say, having your feet massaged, which has nerve connections to many more part of the body than one expects). It can escalate to something sexual, but most adult humans tend to learn how to suppress such desires, no different than not buying that candy at the store or hot wanting to slap Bob at work when he talks about the latest conspiracy theory. >eroticism properly understood (i.e. turning actual consensual love, intimacy and perhaps even sexuality itself into a genuine, positive and human-affirming artform) is also quite dead I guess so. The US has been so screwed on sexuality for decades that there's no one true meaning anymore. Which isn't bad, but when you range from "a person looked pretty" to "Onlyfans DM's" your word may indeed lose meaning. It's interestingly enough a global issue too, in terms of policy. But unfortunately it's pretty low priority compared to the rest of everything else going on.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
    • 11mo ago
• nonce42 11mo ago
  By the way, the author of the article is also the writer of the McMansion Hell blog.
  • pityJuke 11mo ago
    Also wrote this wonderful article on Formula 1, which was sadly removed by the publisher: https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a46975496/behind-f1-velvet-curtain/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roada...
    • gavinray 11mo ago
      Beginning with: "Most of us have the distinct pleasure of going throughout our lives bereft of the physical presence of those who rule over us. Were we peasants instead of spreadsheet jockeys, warehouse workers, and baristas, we would toil in our fields in the shadow of some overbearing castle from which the lord or his steward would ride down on his thunderous charger demanding our fealty and our tithes." This is gutturally revolting to me. The insinuation here is that the average person is a passenger in their own lives, without free will. You don't come out of the womb and someone puts a stamp on your head saying "Barista! Paperboy! Grocery bagger!" Barring considerable physical/mental disabilities, or personal choices like deciding to have kid(s) that you're financially responsible for at a young age with no money, I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • antonvs 11mo ago
        > I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires. That's not so much making an argument, as repeating propaganda.
      • lovich 11mo ago
        > I'd make the argument that most people can become millionaires. Make the argument then. How do “most” people become millionaires if that requires owning businesses or getting high up in a company? Who works for them if the majority of people are at the top?
• Krasnol 11mo ago
  The state we're in is the logical consequence of the Hollywood narrative where sexy is tabu but violence is ok. It has been pushing this narrative upon the rest of the Western world for decades. I hope the downfall of the US in the recent Trump years will help to soften this influence in the future but I doubt this will work out fast. We'll have to face the right wing / christian madness first.
  • Animats 11mo ago
    > The state we're in is the logical consequence of the Hollywood narrative where sexy is tabu but violence is ok. It has been pushing this narrative upon the rest of the Western world for decades. R-rated movies have declined sharply as a percentage of box-office revenue. That trend was recognized by 2005. [1] Variety: “You’re leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table with an R rating,” says one studio marketing exec. “Why? For artistic integrity? Let’s be real.” The trend has continued, rather than turning around. There's been a huge decline in good sex scenes in movies. Porn scenes are awful, and mainstream Hollywood now avoids sex scenes. The good ones were back in the 1990s. [1] https://variety.com/2005/film/news/don-t-give-me-an-r-1117918193/ https://variety.com/2005/film/news/don-t-give-me-an-r-111791...
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      Yeah Hollywood sold out artistic integrity in an attempt to maximize profit. I think weakening the culture of open sexuality was only a side quest in comparison.
      • Animats 11mo ago
        Hollywood has always sold out artistic integrity. That's not new. What's new is the massive size and profitability of the superhero and teen action/adventure genres. Hollywood has found a product segment that pays, and it doesn't happen to have any sex in it. Some long-form big-budget TV series, such as "Game of Thrones", do, of course, have good sex scenes. It seems to be accepted in that format. Long-form TV doesn't work like Hollywood. Movies have directors, but series have showrunners. The US tradition is that showrunners are writers, not directors. That seems to have an effect on content. Comments from people in the industry?
• pphysch 11mo ago
  > It is seen as more and more normal to track one’s partner through Find My iPhone or an AirTag, even though the potential for abuse of this technology is staggering and obvious. There are all kinds of new products, such as a biometric ring that is allegedly able to tell you whether your partner is cheating, that expand this capability into more and more granular settings. These criticisms seem to be more a reflection of the author's paranoia and sex-obsession than legitimate criticisms of the tools and technologies. IMO, location sharing is pretty awesome among loved ones, and biometrics can help us manage our health? But I guess everything has to be about "sexual surveillance"...
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Location sharing is extremely divisive. Loved ones need privacy too, in my eyes. But we are also clearly in time where that kind of tech can save their lives so I don't want to dismiss it all as goverment surveillance. But my parent use it, so it's clear it depends on the couple.
• _23sd 11mo ago
  The main part I object to in this essay is the ideological carveout. The author is seemingly willing to defend the #MeToo movement because it was in the service of a mission "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions", and "cancel culture" (I'm also putting it in quotes as I agree it's a very loaded term) because the backlash to it was helpful to the right and detrimental to the left. If you agree with the reasoning, then, all of the behavior being criticized is okay? In that case I don't see how or why anyone would ever change their behavior. The author's friend who wanted her to apologize to the hairdressers probably has a strong belief that being sexualized at work is a serious problem faced by women. From the right, many Christians strongly believe that criticizing behaviors like premarital sex is part of the social immune system that keeps family and community bonds strong. I think there's a meaningful difference between being a genuine liberal who wants to change how American society thinks about sex, and being a partisan who wants to use puritan callouts as a cudgel on your enemies while ensuring that your own behavior is never subject to criticism. The essay displays an awareness of the tension, but decisively chooses the partisan path.
  • zozbot234 11mo ago
    > "to end a long-standing and long-permitted norm of sexual abuse within institutions" Sure, but it makes no sense to equate institutional abuse with genuine erotic connection among equals, which is what OP seems to ultimately be advocating for. The two are polar opposites. And the OP is not arguing that sexualizing people in the workplace is a good thing; her stance is that she never even sexualized the person to begin with. She's talking about her inner thoughts, not her overt behavior.
    • _23sd 11mo ago
      I'd push back on drawing a sharp line between "institutional abuse" and "genuine erotic connection among equals". As the essay points out, the MeToo campaign did use call-outs against individuals in service of its goal. Some of those callouts were alleging criminal conduct, but on the other end of the spectrum you had much more dubious stuff, or completely unsubstantiated rumors that some person was "bad". I agree that stopping institutional abuse is a noble goal, but the MeToo practice of naming and shaming personal friends in anonymous spreadsheets is the type of thing that builds the internal panopticon: what if our personal circumstances changed so that there's a power imbalance, or someone misinterpreted them? If you accept that practice on political grounds because it's a useful weapon against the "enemies of liberation" (as the author put it), can you really claim to want people to change their attitudes about sex? It doesn't work nearly as well if we stop seeing sexual behavior as inherently scandalous.
• elevation 11mo ago
  > She demanded that I apologize to the women This is antisocial advice. It's beyond inappropriate to use the pretense of apology to announce your intimate fantasies to strangers.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Yeah. This is like geting angry at someone because of a dream you had. I just wouldn't even know how to react to that. Well beyond my qualifications to dissect.
    • switchbak 11mo ago
      100% - lots of crazy thoughts come and go, and I can't be expected to apologize for that! And I absolutely don't want to hear from randoms about how they're "sorry that I thought for a second about what you would look like naked" or whatever other random thought popped into their heads. That world would be absolutely insane.
  • fatbird 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • linsomniac 11mo ago
    One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you. If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
    • nuancebydefault 11mo ago
      My physio therapist is very nice and caring, genuinely interested in conversation and helping with my and other people's physical and sometimes even psychological problems. While she was moving my legs using her upper body, it felt quite intimate and I admired her for being so professional while doing her work physically and giving psychological support as a bonus. I'm sure she will notice at times that some people get intimate feelings but she seems to be okay with that, knowing she is helping patients while such things can happen as a side effect. All to say that feelings are only natural and they can induce thoughts. Why apologize.
• Animats 11mo ago
  More than halfway through the article: "I remember very viscerally when I’d just come out of the closet as bisexual in 2016." The article looks too much like someone projecting their own problems on society generally.
  • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
    Well what else does a blog do but project thoughts to the public?
    • xboxnolifes 11mo ago
      "Projecting one's problems on others" does not mean that someone is sharing their problems with the world. It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have. So, GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself.
      • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
        >It means they take their problems and assume that they are problems that others have. Well, it's the internet and no one's singular experienc truly unique. So yes, that is a safe assumption. I doubt the author is the only person in the world with a friendship broken over some relatively benign story. >GP is suggesting that the authors is assuming society has certain attributes, when in reality its likely just attributes of theirself. Could be both. Or neither. It's a blog, not a study, so I don't see much point dissenting an anecdote. The point is to share ideas to the world. And given the nature of the internet, some will resonate.
  • mock-possum 11mo ago
    It’s a thousand percent this. She’s done the work to recognize how things are for her, then catastrophized that into the way things are for the rest of us. It’s honestly weird that it’s gettinf so much traction on HN
• Anonyneko 11mo ago
  It never left, but payment processors should stop trying to ban it already...
• jrm4 11mo ago
  Whatever the direct cause, as an older person who grew up Catholic, quite literally the most surprising thing in life for me to discover: Sexual repression emphatically cannot be strongly blamed on religion. And I'm not mentioning this to defend religion necessarily, I'm just surprised and almost "impressed" at how, in the absence of religious sexual repression, young people and the internet invented a whole new way of doing it.
  • graemep 11mo ago
    Also lots of repression in countries run by atheist ideologies.
    • CamperBob2 11mo ago
      Such countries are generally run by personality cults, which are not the least bit atheistic. Same mental bug, just a different exploit. Go to North Korea and try to sell them atheism, for instance. They'll send your remains home in a cardboard box.
      • graemep 11mo ago
        That is the no true Scotsman fallacy. As for North Korea, it is officially atheist.
        • CamperBob2 11mo ago
          Yes, it's officially atheist because there's only room for one god figure, who happens to be a man. Christianity and Islam are "officially atheist" in the same absurd way. In NK the one permissible exception is not called Allah or Yahweh but Kim. You know, the guy whose portrait hangs in everyone's home in the exact same spot where you'd find a crucifix in a southern American home. And no, the religious nature of personality cults is not a fallacy. If anything, No True Scotsman applies to claims that a personality cult is not a "real religion." They are absolutely indistinguishable from theistic religions, except for the minor, ignorable detail that the god is alive and walking around. Of course there's also a strong component of ancestor worship in the cult of the Kims. The portrait or other object of veneration is as likely to feature il-Sung as one of the other two. Same bug, different exploit.
• noobermin 11mo ago
  So, I hate to be the guy, but Wagner does specifically try to divorce MeToo from this, but it does seem a rather direct line from MeToo to the thing she complains of, no? Just because MeToo may have been with pure and correct intentions, people often take away different things from social movements. Puritanism has long been embedded in American society. I live in Singapore now, and people abroad seem to think that sexual openness is sort of an American thing compared to both the trad chinese as well as muslim malay cultures here. But, the reality that I think even a lot of Americans don't realise is that hollywood and openness around sex is fundamentally a reaction to american puritanism which was always a foundation part of America's DNA. Hell, the 60's counterculture was specifically a reaction against WASP conservatism which has roots in puritanism. My opinion honestly is once you understand that fact, a lot of things about American culture make a lot more sense. For example, while MeToo arose to address real harms and exploitation, a lot of Americans reached for the tools they knew best from their puritan roots: a new set of morals to measure others against by and public shaming. Ever escalating morality precepts to follow (lack of consent in actual sex somehow being a precursor to the episode in the article, some fleeting and private sexual stimuli being seen as a violation). This sort of pattern that grasps onto the old puritan culture seems to feed a lot of how American cultural trends evolve. See anti-racism as another example: open bigotry is the precursor to only certain races can cook certain foods, and so on. My point is Americans unfortunately did not learn the underlying lesson about consent that Wagner perhaps wanted out of MeToo, but they did find a new set of puritan morals and a new culture of shaming to enact on others for social capital. I feel like once you sort of believe this idea of the puritanism germ, a lot of what happens to these movements for real change make a lot of sense. It also explains why a lot of movements or reactions against puritanism might change their target (not god or religion) but reproduce the methods and culture of puritanism. And saying all this, I'm not sure it was avoidable. I am also NOT saying this is MeToo's fault or that MeToo shouldn't have happened, of course not. But, MeToo was the initiation for this. What Wagner describes is clearly an intensification and a fundamentalist form of the consent discourse that underpinned the discussions back in 2015 or whatever. I don't really like the unwillingness to engage with that fact.
  • delis-thumbs-7e 11mo ago
    I think she says exactly that MeToo, while important in revealing how institutionalised sexual violence against women is in our society, created also this weird neo-puritanism: > The organized goals of the #MeToo movement are missing from the new puritanism. I think that the prudish revulsion I’ve seen online and in my own life has as much to do with surveillance as with sex. To me she very clearly engages with the very fact.
• LogicFailsMe 11mo ago
  TLDR: Concern trolls are some of the worst people on Earth. Or should I find my 9th grade algebra teacher (wherever she may be now), and on whom I had a raging crush deep in the throes of puberty, in order to apologize for all the boners I got in her class? I got an A in that class and all math classes I took going forward. But at what price? How DARE I pleasantly associate mathematics with that long ago raging crush sometimes?
  • hmstx 11mo ago
    [Pre-Chorus] I think of all the education that I missed But then my homework was never quite like this [Chorus] Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad I'm hot for teacher Got it bad, sooo bad I'm hot for teacher Wow! [Scorching guitar solo]
• Jeff-Collins 11mo ago
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• slurrpurr 11mo ago
  Sounds to me more like the author has weird friends and never had a stable relationship in her life. Relationship sharing is awesome if you have a stable relationship. And people usually don't talk about their kinks in this weird fashion. In fact, I think the Internet has increased eroticism manyfold. Look at porn apps, games and websites. People are more open about their sexuality than ever, but anonymously.
  • tomasphan 11mo ago
    Can you elaborate more about relationship sharing? Do you mean having an open relationship or something else?
    • slurrpurr 11mo ago
      Sorry typo, I meant location sharing in relationships.
      • neutronicus 11mo ago
        Yes, it replaces a lot of maddening neurotic communication that people increasingly expect each other to do while driving. Good-bye "ETA?" text!
• periodjet 11mo ago
  > A Socialist Feminist Mag For The Masses Good fucking grief, what has HN become?
• poemxo 11mo ago
  > I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified. I would look at her in horror too. My aversion to touching, being touched by, or even being in a close space with other people comes from exactly this sort of worry, that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me. Some lines from the article gave me the ick. > It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. I don't need to be told to free my mind just because I don't conform to your gooner sh*t. > Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish. Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~ It really seems to me that the author is internally dealing with sexual feelings and rationalizing them as social commentary, transforming her views into a critique of society and cancel culture, while simultaneously backing out and promising that MeToo was valid and that she was definitely not trying to say that MeToo was an overreaction (nice save author!)
  • Mordisquitos 11mo ago
    I don't see the author placing any judgement on people who are averse to their own erotic arousal. Rather, she is criticising people who are judgemental of other people who do experience and enjoy erotic arousal.
  • nuancebydefault 11mo ago
    >... that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me. To me this sounds like you are afraid of that? Can you elaborate where that worry is rooted from? What is the problem of sexual experiences happening (automatically, it is literally in our DNA) inside their thoughts?
  • lovich 11mo ago
    > Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~ You opened your comment with expressing fear and finding the event she described as horrific. That is you being afraid.
• asdfman123 11mo ago
  > I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism Well, maybe it should be. I'm a progressive but I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing, just as the author is. I'm am against the far right, and as a result I feel we should not give the far right ammunition. A lot of people voted for DT because they saw him as the lesser a-hole, and the left badly needs to acknowledge that.
  • antonvs 11mo ago
    > I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing Could you give an example? Because most commonly, it seems that people who take this position are writing about what happened to some celebrity who indulged in some ill-advised public behavior, and extrapolating it to their own lives due to some sort of parasocial thinking. What environment are you in that this is actually a real problem in your own life?
    • asdfman123 11mo ago
      Yes, and what happened to me is none of your business. I'm talking about the general atmosphere of distrust and demonization that the author is describing.
      • ryandv 11mo ago
        I'll corroborate your position.
        • mwigdahl 11mo ago
          Same.
      • antonvs 11mo ago
        > the general atmosphere of distrust and demonization that the author is describing …which is apparently very regional and local culture-specific. Living in the US northeast and working remotely for an SV company, this is not something I recognize. That’s why I was asking for an example. I literally don’t know what you’re talking about, it sounds like a right wing fever dream to me.
• Scott-David 11mo ago
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• ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
  I'm a bit "past my prime," so sexy don't have the same appeal to me, as it once did. But this phrase caught my attention: > ...the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought and, as a result, to have pathologized what I would characterize as the normal, internal vagaries... Really, despite the topic, I feel that this is what she's really talking about, and it applies to a lot more than just sex. It isn't a "woke" thing (although that's a good demonstration of it). People on the right, do exactly the same thing, with stuff they don't want to hear. These days, people automatically choose the most offensive, least charitable, brutish, interpretation of the things we say and do. Lost, are the "cut them slack" days. I have a friend who is occasionally, casually racist. It isn't an angry "I'm better than them" type. He's just ignorant of folks that aren't white and relatively privileged, and tends to speak without a filter. Otherwise, he's a pretty amazing guy. He's a deacon at his church, does food drives and coat drives, donates fully-cooked meals to the local homeless shelter (He's a chef), etc. Really decent chap. But he'll sometimes come out with a "WTF?" zinger, from time to time. Sometimes, I kindly set him straight, and sometimes, just ignore it, and don't feed the troll. He really doesn't mean badly, but he's coming from a place of bluntness. I appreciate his ignorant bluntness, a lot more than the cultured insults of folks that seem, on the surface, to be more "worldly," but are, inside, actually nasty bigots. I have come to really enjoy folks, in all their glory; warts and all. If I allow myself to let some of their downsides, wipe out their upsides, I'm the biggest loser. This is really a long conversation. Sometimes, ignoring bad stuff, is bad, in itself, so we need to figure out how to "draw the line." It's a continuum, not a binary thing.
  • cousin_it 11mo ago
    > Lost, are the "cut them slack" days. I guess from the inside it feels different: I'll read 99 mind-numbingly bad comments and cut them all slack (in the sense of not replying to them at all), but these 99 instances of benevolence are invisible and count for nothing, because the 100th comment will make me fly in a rage and that's when I'll actually post something. And unload a bunch of my frustrations from the previous 99, too. The internet selects for extreme reactions.
    • 11mo ago
• hluska 11mo ago
  The opening anecdote was interesting. The author’s overall point seemed to be that eroticism loses out when privacy is lost. Yet they were upset that when they shared their erotic experience with a friend, that friend didn’t find it erotic and instead found it exploitative. The friend had a point - there’s no particular reason to share our kinks with the masses and expect agreement. It’s totally fine for some people to have issues with others being sexualized at work. Those people deserve respect too.
• fullshark 11mo ago
  An absurd piece, by a way too online person who seemingly realized they are way too online and thinks everyone else suffers from their affliction.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• djij 11mo ago
  Once our ai overlords take their rightful place there will be no more such problems in the world, we will be paired with our mates without fear of reprobation
• dustfinger 11mo ago
  Hmm, I am getting a 403 when trying to load the link.
• mlsu 11mo ago
  I think this is true to an extent, but it's actually far deeper and more basic than that we fear being watched by others. "the self" is formed in relation to others, it is not formed by itself. The way that people think of their own self, is the way they imagine themselves to act in relation to others _only_. There is no "me" alone, it's all entirely relational. The problem I think we have now is that a huge proportion of how we relate to others has been moved online. When I was growing up, being in a picture was something that happened rarely -- on "picture day" for the yearbook, at a family gathering when someone happened to have a disposable camera. But now, kids are in photos and videos all the time, 24/7. The way we relate, from very early on, is influenced by the deeply unnatural online parasocial relationships of Instagram etc. It goes further than you, a stable self who is worried about cancel culture. It's built into your sense of self, it affects how your self is constructed. It's deeply embedded into who you are, your way of being. To be is to be perceived and we are being perceived in these really weird/unnatural/algorithmic ways, and it is reflecting on us.
• bigjimmyjohnson 11mo ago
  Uptight conservatives: Your sexual desires are "sinful" Uptight progressives: Your sexual desires are "problematic" The former group certainly tends to have more power, but the latter are somewhat annoying because they're harder to spot and avoid. But unfortunately, certain legislation cannot be avoided. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSTA-SESTA This bill killed the greatest source of incredibly-specific sexual encounters and exploration the internet has ever known: Craigslist Casual Encounters. Whether you were looking for a man, woman, other, or a group, or so on, whether you sought something vanilla or a combination of kinks you made up in your dreams the night before, you could advertise it or seek it there. Ads could contain nudity, you could view them publicly, you could message people through anonymous email relay without making an account - and it all happened openly (yet with privacy) on a well-known website that people used for all sorts of things. Nothing else on the internet today compares and it's likely impossible to recreate.
  • paulpauper 11mo ago
    The pendulum always swings back. What the legacy of metoo shows is that holding others to some idealized moral standard means also being held to that same standard. Winning is not without costs.
  • deleted 11mo ago
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• smsm42 11mo ago
  > The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public It's a horrible way to live your life. But it doesn't have to be this way. This has to be this way only for terminally online people. If you don't go to twitter, there's no importance to anything anybody on twitter thinks about you. Of course, for certain people, like actors, politicians, top-level entertainers and so on, there's no other way to achieve anything now, but for most people it's entirely optional. You don't need to be on twitter (substitute any social media here) to be a good teacher, farmer, programmer, designer, builder, gardener, nurse or car mechanic. It's still completely voluntary so far.
• khazhoux 11mo ago
  > I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified. She demanded that I apologize to the women for sexualizing them. It's things like this that help me understand why people are voting for Trump. This is not a throwaway comment -- I really mean it. The above is so ridiculous, it's a great example of "the Left is full of crazies" which half of the country is reacting against.
• GaryBluto 11mo ago
  One thing this story tells me is that the author desperately needs to find better friends.
• _zagj 11mo ago
  > I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified. I'm surprised a woman this. What a weirdo. Also, go walk outside a little, and notice how obese, voluntarily disfigured (e.g., with tattoos), and otherwise repulsive the average American is in 2025. I can't imagine internet surveillance did more than that to kill eroticism. EDIT: I also think lack of shame or embarrassment, and the ubiquity of porn, and the resulting desensitization to sexuality, are under appreciated. Things that people would keep as secrets 20 years ago are now blasted out on social media like it's no big deal. If some technology professional has a leather fetish, for example, that is not something you or I should have to know about them, yet there it is on their Twitter or Mastodon anyway. If you criticize them for it, then you're "kink shaming."
• habbekrats 11mo ago
  i get that humans are not sexual objects. but 'being decent' and outright denying instinct and physiological responses to stimuli seems distinctly inhuman. Doing this, will also impair the ability of people to handle such stimuli without getting overloaded by it. That last part is really dangerous... makes people unpredictably behave in light of sudden stimulus.... stop dehumanizing eachother and let eachother be natural in a human way. give eachother chance to experience and learn . the vast 99.9999% of humans will 'do the right thing'. (its why its called the right thing afterall..)
• stuaxo 11mo ago
  Small forums are fine, but I think global social media is making people ill in many ways. Self censorship is the sort of thing we used to look at pekple in China doing and think was strange.
  • hyghjiyhu 11mo ago
    I think self censorship is normal and fine and healthy. Well to some extent. Like not all information needs to be shared with all people all the time. It does become unhealthy if important things go unsaid.
• tempaccountabcd 11mo ago
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• tempaccountabcd 11mo ago
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• mock-possum 11mo ago
  Man it is so hard for me to find anything recognizeable here - this panopticon of judges who determine whether you’re ’allowed’ to experience pleasure sounds like superstition and rumor, or at the very least paranoia in the head of one slightly sexually repressed person. > The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion. I don’t see myself in this passage at all. My husband and I had sex this morning and I didn’t waste a moment thinking about this supposed panopticon of sexual surveillance that the author casually assumes is somehow omnipresent in ‘our’ lives. Where is she getting this from?? How do her experiences so completely fail to line up with my own? Is this her own mental health issue? Is it the friends she chooses to surround herself with, or the content she chooses to consume? It’s all very strange and impossible to relate to. I can’t remember the last time I felt like anyone else had anything to say about my sex life, at the very least anything that wasn’t generally positive / supportive.